I have recently build a storage cum media server for my personal use and also to consolidate the data lying around in 4-5 different external hard disks. It would house my Personal photos, Personal Family Videos in HD, Movie (HD and others) and Music collection .The primary motivation for building rather than buying was expandibility, upgradability and at least 10TB+ storage in future. The machine would be running for more than 48 hrs on weekends and weekdays I don't see much usage for it
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Following are the details of the machine:
Case: Cooler Master HAF 922 Mid Tower Cabinet (Fitted with additional 120 mm bottom and 200 mm side panel fan)
Power Supply: Cooler Master Silent Pro 600W
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3P MB
Processor: Intel Core i5-750 Processor (8M Cache, 2.66 GHz)
Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper TX3
RAM: 2GB * 3 - 6GB Corsair TR3X6G1333C9 DDR3 1333MHz (Currently using only 4GB)
OS HDD: 500 GB * 2 Western Digital Green HDD WD5000AADS (Configured on RAID 1)
Graphics Card : XFX ATI Radeon HD4670 1GB DDR3
HDD Cage : iStarUSA Hot-Swap Backplane Raid Cage BPU-230SA-BLUE * 2 (Capable of holding 6 drives total)
SATA Controller Card: Highpoint RocketRAID 2300 SATA 4 Port card (Yet to arrive)
Data HDD: 2 * 1 TB Western Digital WD10EARS (in JBOD)
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate (planning to move to WHSv2 (Vail) once it releases)
Notes: I also plan to attach the SANS Tower RAID 4 bay enclosure to expand my storage in near future.
I had a lot of questions around this system so let me start with few here:
1. Currently I read a lot about TLER and the issues associated with that in WD Green drives. Currently I have put 2 500 GB WD Green (model specified above) in RAID1 on my Marvell 6 Gbps SATA controller. They are AHCI enabled and it's a hardware raid. Will I run into issues or it would be alright to use these drives in consumer environments like mine
. Currently I was contemplating of buying WD RE3 drives instead for OS. Currently they are not available in the region I live in. So I am not sure which way to go here. Also whether the choice of Data drives fine?
2. Currently I have not done any overclocking on this system and it is enabled in Turbo mode which as per Gigabyte does some auto overclocking so I see at peak loads my system can go to 2.78 Ghz (BCLKx21). By measuring the temps on the CPU in idle conditions I get 32-35 degree Celsius. The CPU during peak load using Prime95 reaches and saturates at 59-62 degree mark. These are CPU core temperatures. The ambient room temperature was around 27 degrees when I measured these temps (there is no air conditioning in this room). Is this good enough or should I be worried about these temperatures.I have no plans of overclocking the system for now
. Although the Cooler master Hyper 212 plus was my first choice but was not available locally
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3. As you can see I made a mistake while buying RAM and ended up buying the triple channel one and hence leaving me with 1 stick unusable. Currently I have put only 2 sticks to use the dual channel appropriately but was wondering how can I use the third. Also if I buy a second set of dual channel memory and put them will they cause issues. I can make sure the timing, voltage etc. matches for them but not too sure whether it will be exact same model though.
4. Since I am using Windows 7 OS I wanted to know what softwares are recommended for monitoring Disk health etc (Prferably freeware). I checked out smartmon tools on Sourceforge and crystal disk info as well. You can share your experience with these softwares. Any other recommendations?
5. Currently the data hosted on the data drive is backed up on a 2 TB NAS separately. But after that I plan to have different HDD in the current machine having duplicates. I could have gone with RAID but then the recovery is painful and having manually data duplicated requires work
. I read about flexRaid and disParity etc. but couldn't get much information on how useful they are. If you could share your experiences it would be of great help. Also if I migrate to Vail this could get addressed by folder duplication.
6. Also currently I am not too sure how to migrate to Vail from Windows 7. Still I have some reading to do. Basically I wasn't sure when I add my data drives to storage pool, will it format it or there is a choice to keep it intact. Incase you have some insights, I will be more than glad to hear your thoughts.
7. I have a few 2.5 and 3.5 External HDD lying around with data which I think I would need to sell because I couldn't see how I can fit them here or get an enclosure which can fit them all in one. I am planning to buy new 1 TB disks and copy all these data into this NAS housed data drives. Any suggestions on re-usability are welcome.
I have done my share of RTFF
and have read quite a lot of threads. In case some questions are very noob please excuse me. Any other general feedback, critique and creative ideas are most welcome
. I understand these are myriad of questions and one forum is not enough to get answers.
I will post the photos of the build pretty soon.